Fallacy. Yes, that’s the word for it.
There’s something about the late November nights that always fascinated me. And while the freezing wind was cutting small creases in my skin, I couldn’t help but wonder on how far the human nature will go into both fascinating and disappointing me.
I... don’t know what to begin with. I cannot describe myself as to suite any stranger’s beadings, or well enough for you to understand.
I’m just... more than meets the eye.
Ever since I could remember myself, I’ve been mostly restless. Maybe the fact that my only values in life were shattered into pieces was enough to start a conflict inside me. And maybe because I was different, I could never find a place of my own. I’m tired of searching, often finding temporary solutions that only seem to weaken my spirit all the more. But I still cannot stand and watch myself getting brainwashed by false values and self absorbed egos.
Sometime in your life you get used to the fact that people are never what they seem and that they break your hopes into tiny fragments at the time you expected most from them. Like when you grow up and find out that your parents aren’t always right and later on, that „forever” is a big joke, no matter how deep things might get. It’s a part of us all. It’s just the way we react that makes us different. You cannot ask for „forever” from a nature that is damned to be ephemeral.
And when people see you on the side of evil, there’s not much you can do to change their opinion.

I was visited by an angel in my dreams. She appeared to me as a relief, as a healer for the pain inflicted by others. She never spoke, but always sang me lullabies, so I wouldn’t cry anymore. Her voice was warm and soothing. With small palms she embraced my face to calm my nightmares away. She had long, blond hair and pale skin. Apart from her translucent wings, she wore something that resembled a cloak. I could never see her eyes, there was always too much light around her face.
Afterwards I would cry less. I got more detached from my lost innocence and hopes and more addicted to my dreams.
Rarely do I dream of her now, but I haven’t forgotten her figure. And she doesn’t sing to me anymore, only walks away.
She turned away from me, as she saw how others fed on my innocence, how I started losing my humanity to these ego-absorbed creatures. Heavy claws grabbed her wings, pulling her to the ground, where she fell. Her wings turned to black and her halo broke into pieces. In her fall for mankind no one cried. No one knew she used to be an angel of the Lord.
Now she is walking away, smiling sadly at anyone who dares to raise their eyes towards her. She has a torn wing.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if she really turned away from me, or if she lost her way, somewhere in this world.
I’ve seen fairy tales crashing before my eyes, flames covering the empty walls around them, angels mourning every drop of lost innocence. It happened again and again, until I felt I had nothing more to give. But life kept on taking.
I cannot see anything good left in me. Anything pure in my heart. This is how we lose what we treasure the most.

I never excelled at anything. I was good at some things and not so good at other things. I gave up dreams, hoping to find my peace with different realms. But it seemed that, no matter what I did, it was never enough. It strangled me tighter with every day passing by and it didn’t want to stop. I had to fight it!
Years and years full of choler. I always tried to avoid conflicts, fighting with all my strength, taking shots just for the sake of making it stop. A constant pain in my chest kept me from answering. I closed my eyes and I let everything flow through me.
But now I had to face again the one who was my kin. My kin, my enemy.
Voices seemed to pass through me like echoes. They resonated a few seconds in my chest, then faded away, leaving me empty and dead.
I felt I was burning, my eyes ached filled with fire, while shadows slowly took over my spirit. A searing pain went through my head as I gripped on my last drop of sanity. I sensed all my demons awaking, sinking their claws in my soul, pulling and ripping me apart. My only choice was to release and embrace them.
I sat with my eyes closed and felt like I was suffocating, breathing a scent that reminded me of sulphur. The continuous pain in the left side of my chest reminded me my heart was still beating somehow.
My mind was haunted with memories, parts of words that had no sense.
I tasted venom in every touch and my flesh ached, paralyzed in fainting. I didn’t know how to pull myself out of the thorns.

I couldn’t speak, but my mind kept repeating: God, it’s so easy for you to walk away…
I’m on the verge of a meltdown. Something is strongly pressing against my head, making me feel dizzy and weak. It’s insanity, pumping on the sides of my forehead. And an emptiness in my stomach, like a black hole, pulling my insides through me. A bitter taste floods my mouth.
It’s funny how some things turn out to be after a while. You realize, that after all the things you’ve been trying to repair, all you’ve done is to build yourself a more indulgent Hell. Metaphorically speaking.
Then I felt something warm on my lips, with a different flavour. Blood. I didn’t realize that I was biting them all along until they broke. I gritted my teeth then pressed my lips hard against them.
In the end, it doesn’t matter how many times and on what levels you’ve been broken. It all turns to ashes, eventually.
I'm lying here, with my senses blurred and my heart beating fast. I feel I'm filling myself up with poison. I’m so sick of everything that I want to take the first train out of here, no matter where it goes.
Noises crowd my mind, until I feel that all my thoughts are screaming loudly from pits. Mocking me. Shadows, whispering my name. Like a demonic embrace, calling me from the Underworld. I wished I could only reach the entrance.
The city was dead. Slumbering beneath my feet like after a plague, silence reigned in a strange, timeless scene. Fever covered my eyes as I looked at my watch ‘Another half an hour lost, time has always been fooling around...’

They’re all around us. Messing with our minds, whispering sweet lies in our ears. Seeding doubt so deep in our mind that our whole world now revives around the question: ‘what if?’
How many wars has this land seen, how many heroes on their knees...
My hands were trembling when I reached for something to hold on to. Cold steel, and mud, and somebody in my back continuously fiddling and messing up my hair. I grab it and place it aside. And fall – again – in the vortex of thoughts that managed to seduce me in my lonesome moments, although something inside me was whispering „Beware!”
I’ve seen so many puppet plays that I got sick of the fake smiles, violently painted across their faces, and of their screeching voices. They are going along with their masquerade over and over again. We all have masks but who asked you to cover yours in several bright colours in order to distract the others from flaws and cheap pieces of fabric? All in all, it’s not how expensive your mask looks and how pretty you are from a – let’s call it safe – distance, but how it survives against the storms. Or you keep changing them until they change you. You’re left with neither your soul, nor your mind and identity. You become a shadow, slipping away into the nothingness you, yourself have created.
And still, I feel that cut, deep inside, especially on those cold, winter nights.
I have thought so many times about my past, about the people I’ve known and about those who made a difference in my life. Some of them are gone. We were separated by circumstances – call them pride, changes, misunderstandings or death. The last one is the only one incapable of being fixed, but maybe the only one that creates such a small gap between you and the person you’ve been separated from. Isn’t that ironic? And doesn’t it seem so hard to fix the other circumstances, although they can’t hold a hair up to death? We think we’re so strong, so proud, so invulnerable, but are we really?
We consume ourselves in tragedies. We manage to trip over some of them, more or less affected, more or less bruised, impressed or broken. Some weaken you, some make you stronger, some open up your heart and others freeze it. All in all, it’s a merry-go-round doomed to break. A Russian roulette where the price you pay is your soul.
Tragedies replace themselves. Smaller ones are overwhelmed when more disastrous events occur and take over. The answer never lies anywhere out there… but in. But what’s to do when you feel that there’s nothing left inside?
I was invited to a gathering some of my acquaintances were having, for „old-times sake”. I thought it couldn’t be worse than my isolation between four walls of pain, so I decided to go along with it.
It was an empty place, without a certain ambience. Small and intimate, at least at the beginning. The light was dim, in a pleasant way, and the music wasn’t disturbing, nor loud. Maybe if I haven’t felt so uneasy, I would have liked it. Outside it was raining heavily.
Sitting at a tall table, I left my coat beside me and started to sink my fingernails in the beer bottles’ label, as I always do.
Somewhere in the past I can say we had common interests. I was sighting at the memory of those nights, when confusion and empty laughter clogged my mind. It was almost unbelievable how much things have changed.
All paths sometimes end.
Painful memories clouded my mind as I started to regret what has happened. I did my best, but I couldn’t embrace the self destruction that took me over each time their ego-absorbed actions were played.
I was building conversations, apparently silly ones, to hide my overall oppression. I was listening. My thoughts were flowing absently, going from what I wanted to do with my life, to what I gave up, in order to avoid hurting the others – I was so naïve. The fact that most of the people who realized what my true nature was, ended up in using me for their temporary happiness, ignoring the pain it might have caused me. Things started to get even more severe when I tried to find a reason for their actions, then realizing that there were no other reasons but human natures’ perversity.
The conversations continued. Without tracing a certain line, I realized how infantile those ideas were, and how I nodded, empty minded, at all the gibberish. I was ripping the label apart, placing the small pieces of tin foil aside. I felt I was losing my mind, that something I did, long ago, placed me beyond the point of no return.
I was being reminded, over and over, how I went astray, but there was nothing to be done for me to go back to my “old self”. I wasn’t going to search for their excuses, this time.
My collocutor’s behaviour wasn’t doing me any good, either. I was thinking how much I needed to control myself, in order to avoid any bad remarks or painful memories. But I was losing my patience. My left hand was hurting, and then I noticed how I actually was sinking my fingernails into my skin, leaving deep traces into the lines of my palms. The ones that once, when I was young, were read to me. Childish things like “You will marry for love” or “You will have a long life” were prancing through my thoughts, but at least they managed to keep me from my general fallacy state. “Re-writing my destiny” I laughed to myself.
You never realize what you have until you lose it, permanently.  Maybe that’s what it will be like for them, when they search for me and finally discover that I’m not there anymore.
Paying more attention, I sat at a large table. Noise, colours, walls with several paintings on them. Empty glasses and filled ashtrays. Laughter and meaningful glances. Old faces, brought back in the present, some staring at me with amazement, others with disapproval. They were wondering, probably, what does a creature of the past doing here.
What was I doing there?
I remember that walk in the cold I took after dark. Although my feet hurt like hell and I couldn’t feel my hands anymore, it somehow did me well, it was something that relaxed me, made me focus better. And it was then when I felt the numbness starting to unravel over me. It doesn’t frighten me whatsoever, it’s better than suffering, anyway.
I felt cold and bitter. My feet led me to a park. It looked like an abandoned nightmare – where monsters forgot to crawl out of their hiding places and demons fell asleep in people’s thoughts. 
I kept repeating a song in my head, to keep myself company, to help me not to go insane from the pressure on my shoulders. I leaned on the park bench, keeping myself warm with my hands. It was never what I wanted, but at least it was quiet.
Finding you in the break of dawn, alone, with yourself. Thinking that the numbing pain is all in your head, tasting your own venom over and over again.
Good intentions are the pathway to hell. It’s like that drop of mercury you don’t see in your glass of sweet wine, after you lifted it for a toast and glanced behind your curtain. They won’t notice you missing and eventually someone will find you lying, breathless, on the bed’s mattress.
I feel sick. Because of last night, because of myself.
Only trying to escape, I awoke so many demons inside me, that there is no good left. I cannot move, my head is swollen from the pain and I feel every attempt to even breathe to be utterly exhausting and mind throbbing.
Where can you go when your place is anywhere but home?
The hollow sound of my heels resonated like an echo while I was walking along the deserted streets. It was an hour of dead silence, of emptiness. Of haunting.
Tall fences surrounded the area and a locked gate kept me from getting in. I could see toy houses, bright colours, covered by rust and decay. There was fog, all around. Thick, humid fog, spreading like smoke all around my sight. Looked like hell releasing its steam. The midnight possession, searching for its victims.
Heavy drops of water keep falling from trees, occasionally hitting your head, sending icy shivers down your spine, like the mistakes you keep repeating, hoping that once, just once, Lady Fate will smile upon you. Fate is no lady and her crooked smile doesn’t show anything good to come.
As your feet start to freeze you know there is no return and are too afraid of the dark to do anything: run, hide, look for someone that is looking for you, and scream their name before darkness swallows you.
All in all, it looks like a nightmare. It smells like rust. It feels like death. And as your flesh starts to ache, you wonder, where the hell was that wrong turn you took?
 I miss some of my good times, when I was surrounded by so many people that I thought they cared. One by one, they left or slowly searched for other companies. But that’s my past, no reason to bring it back now. I think I’m starting to cope with that Shakespearian quote: ‘What’s done is done’. It’s just done, not forgotten or forgiven – It just cannot be changed.
Yet, I’m falling…
I met enough people in my life who managed to make me see that as different as they may seem, they all have a common root. Humanity is a deep, venomous pit, filled with hungry monsters, all trying to pull you down.
People look into your eyes and down into your soul without actually caring about the consequence of them messing up. And I’m sick of finding a reason for everything I do, and giving explanations that will anyway be mistaken for ignorance. Nothing can be repaired.
Soon it was going to be dark. The lights in the park were lit, and the surroundings were filled with a ghostly appearance. Fog was starting to thicken and I had an absent stare. I couldn’t sense someone sitting next to me until later on. I got up. But it was nothing. Somewhere, far away, I could see a white silhouette over the lake. It was too dark to tell, but the figure strongly resembled an angel. I felt hypnotized, attracted to that strange figure. I forgot about my pain, my darkness. She reminded me of my fallen saviour, the angel in my dreams. Suddenly, she started to disappear in another cloud of fog. I ran towards the lake. I wanted to scream for her.
-Wait for me!
My voice resonated into the park’s silence and woke me up from my trance, just before I could slip into the lake, its shore all blurred up by the thick fog.
For days I’ve been drowning in numbness, denying everything that has happened. It was all in my head, a story I’ve made up a long time ago. 
I had a nightmare. The sky was lit only by lightning. Deafening thunder proved that the storm was close. I felt lost, and ran down the road, hoping to find shelter. I couldn’t see too much around me, only deserted plains. I was in the middle of nowhere, with the sole thought of not wanting to die.

At the end of the road, it was her. I could see her face this time, clear black eyes stared at me, like dark marbles. She smiled crookedly. Behind her hands, she was holding a scythe.

It smelt like cigarettes and dead hopes everywhere. You couldn’t help but noticing the lost stare in most eyes from that forgotten little bar. Like it or not, you face that time in your life when you sell yourself for others’ emotions, for hopes, dreams, wealth or sins of the flesh. It’s all a matter of how you sell them and to whom – we all end up empty, anyway.
My book doesn’t need to be written. It’s writing itself here and now and my words going on and on do nothing but to fill in the blanks I have left until my final point.
I remembered: I was cold, holding on to myself, setting aside what I know, to see what I have lost and somehow this countdown doesn’t seem to end soon. Was I too much of a fool? When I got out I could still feel my hair smelling of cigarette smoke, the dead hopes lost themselves on the way to the door. I took my red scarf from my bag and tied it around my neck. It smelt like perfume, my perfume.
And when I heard the plastic bag being wrapped on my face, like in a dream, I knew it was all over.
I woke up with my pillow soaked in bitterness.

Epilogue
It’s all a game. Hide and seek, catch me if you can, childish stuff that manage to play the cruellest tricks on you when you get older.
They pushed me into this when I was a child, when I didn’t realize I was playing with forces I couldn’t understand. Yes, it was foolish. Yes, it could have cost me my life back then. But now I’m here, aren’t I? I fought and I am still fighting. I lost battles and won broken wings, I’m still marching on my road to the unknown. Don’t have time to stop, cry, or plead for mercy. I can only look around at what others manage to ruin in this world. I fought for some values and ended up in defeat. But surrender is not an option.
And yes, ideal people are only in movies. But they’re not people, they are mere temporary sketches of someone’s portrait of perfection. This portrait changes during life, influenced by a falling leaf or a raised eyebrow. We alone are fragments in time, shallow and proud in our little world.
It was much easier as a child. You had a guiding hand in which you put all your faith and everything eventually turned out to be ok. Now, when you can’t even trust your own mind, you find yourself eager to be fooled once and once again. Searching for peace, you either end up fallen or a happy fool. I guess that’s a kind of ignorance also. But one regarding yourself.
I will never change my ways for others, or sell my soul for their beliefs.
I touched my forehead. It was burning with fever. That could explain the nightmare. Is our whole life only a dream?
But fever will never burn out the tears in my eyes or hollowness in my soul. I can’t cover my ears to reduce the screams to silence, can’t hide my fear, can’t crawl in a miserable corner by myself and mourn for the wings I lost. My guardian angel betrayed me and sold my soul to the Devil for some forsaken purpose. My demons are alive, feeding upon what’s left of me. Hurt. Poison and vanilla scented candles. My heart is so weak I can barely hear it beating. Just the constant pain reminds me it’s still there. But I will go on.
I’d better die as a fairytale than live as a ruin.
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